Traditional data compression involves the compression of data at a source (e.g., at a transmitter node) and the reconstruction of the data at a destination (e.g., at a terminal node). Functional compression is a form of data compression where data is compressed at one or more sources, but only a function of the original data is computed at a destination, rather than a full reconstruction of the original data. By only requiring a function of the original data to be computed at the receiver, a higher level of compression may often be achieved over traditional compression techniques. Techniques are needed for effectively implementing functional compression.